Grizzly Analytics Blog

The acquisition of an early stage Israeli start-up company, KitLocate, by Russian Internet giant Yandex ( YNDX ), was treated as yet another small M&A in the press. Many articles reported the acquisition, summarized KitLocate 's technology for reducing the power consumption of GPS-based mobile applications, mentioned that Yandex is maintaining the KitLocate office as an Israeli R&D center, and then moved to the next topic. Yet another acquisition. But the implications of this acquisition are in fact much greater. Yandex's adoption and promotion of KitLocate's technology is ushering in an era in which mobile location-based services are pervasive, meaning that instead of being turn-on-turn-off, they are always on. This has huge implications for mobile technology and related M&A.... See the full article on SeekingAlpha:  Yandex's Acquisition Of KitLocate Foreshadows An Era Of Pervasive Location Services http://seekingalpha.com/article/2117603-yandexs-acqu...

Catching up on some of the great technology I saw at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC) one month ago, here's a video of Broadcom's indoor location positioning technology demo. Broadcom makes chips, and this demo shows one of their chips tracking the location of a phone as it moves around. UPDATED: The Samsung phone shown here is a Samsung Galaxy S4 that contains a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip, running special software to interact with a Broadcom chip inside the Wi-Fi access points used in the demo, which are also running special software inside. More on this below. Broadcom's location positioning, in this demo, is based on a technique called Wi-Fi trilateration. This means that the phone starts with a database of locations of Wi-Fi access points, and calculates its own location based on the distances that it computes from each nearby access point.  Broadcom's primary innovation here is that the trilateration is not done using signal strength, which tends to give...